Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Wow, this one was fairly difficult. I have never really had much interest in science fiction, and it definitely shows in this project. I’m trying to expand as a designer and I will definitely work on more sci-fi related projects to round things out for the future.

Title: Sci-Fi City

Time Spent: 2 hours

Assets Used: Unreal Infiltration Demo Pack

This one is less of a level, and more of a vista. I will likely go back and improve on this piece since I feel that it’s lacking in many areas. Maybe add places to, you know… walk.

Feedback and suggestions would be great here, I’m struggling a lot with this genre.

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This post is over a month late as Global Game Jam 2015 occurred on January 23-25, but hey, at least I’m posting about it!

I’ve been approached a few times with questions regarding game jams, so I figure I’ll elaborate here. Put simply, game jams are one of the best ways of improving your skills as a game developer. It’s a bold statement I know, but I think it’s fairly accurate.

Game jams are community events that encourage game developers of all sorts to get together and develop games.

Easy enough right? Well, there is a catch. There are usually restrictions associated with the development process. There’s often a time limit, many game jams (e.g. Global Game Jam) require you to make and submit a game within a 48-hour time span (You are always welcomed to continue work on it afterwards though). Some may last months at a time (e.g. One Game A Month).

Some jams also require you to base your game around a specific topic, which is disclosed at the beginning of the event. Other jams may leave the topic completely up to the developer, but could restrict genre (e.g. Fuck This Jam). Group sizes, team roles, and other restrictions can be brought forth, it really depends on how the game jam’s organizing crew puts it together.

The key element of a game jam, in my opinion, is the time limit. It forces a deadline on developers and encourages them to build a playable product within a period of time. These hard deadlines are a great way to motivate developers to attempt completing projects. It’s very easy to fall into a slump when making games, and it’s common to see people quitting projects before fully seeing them through. Giving people hard deadlines helps this problem to an extent.

I believe that it is extremely beneficial for developers to get together with their communities and participate in game jams, these events are great for learning, personal growth and networking, so I definitely recommend attending local and global game jams if you plan to become a game developer. Heck, show up even if you don’t intend to make games, it’s a fantastic opportunity to see how your local game community operates. Many notable indie game titles started as game jam prototypes.

With that said, let’s talk about my personal experience with Global Game Jam 2015.

We had a team of around 7 people working together for the first time during the jam. With such a large group and no evident leader, we found that everything was extremely unorganized, so we’ll be preparing to make things more efficient if we work together in the future.

The event was held at the local college, so we opted to use their computers to develop a flash game using Actionscript and Flixel. No one had actually known how to develop in flash, so it was a completely fresh learning experience. As a rule, you should probably use a programming language that you’re comfortable with when trying to make a game in 48 hours. We knew it would be messy, but we were interested in what the results would be, so we did it anyways.

Much of the development was planned for the final day, and of course, a power outage happened to fall on the last day of the jam. As a result, we lost a huge chunk of our planned time, and were unable to get remotely close to what we wanted.

It was a bit of a disaster, we weren’t able to get solid assets down, the gameplay and mechanics were nowhere to be seen, and there wasn’t even a way to end the game.

But it was a fantastic learning experience that gave us a lot of insight about working together, and a lot of knowledge about Flash. We were able to learn enough to at least get something up and running within a 48-hour time span, so it wasn’t a waste of time.

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JungleShoots is an early attempt of mine at building a first-person shooter using the Unity engine.

The game took about a week to put together, using many references and guides that I found on the internet. It was meant to be a quick test game that I used to learn the ropes of Unity and coding in C#, so it is by no means a complete product.

The game is a simple multi-player FPS where players shoot at each other. Networking is fully functional, allowing up to 20 players to join a room.

JungleShoots(name pending) is fairly bare-bones at the moment. If I decide to work on it later, I would probably add actual character models and animations, sound, AI bots, a scoring system, and a few other simple elements.

Things that I took away from this project:

Monodevelop/C# coding fundamentals

Unity Engine basics

Network coding

Raycasting

First Person Controllers

Physics systems

Animation

Collision detection

Unity is an excellent platform to start developing on, there are a great deal of resources available online, and many of them are completely free.

The content will be making a shift from news-oriented articles to personal, opinion-based pieces. These will take longer to write, and as a result, will be posted less frequently. Opinion blogging will give me an opportunity to upload quality topics with more substance, which you guys will hopefully find more interesting.

All of the gaming news has been consolidated into a category on the right side of the page, but most of it is outdated so I don’t see why you’d even bother checking that out.

I’m currently immersed in game development, and my future posts will reflect the developmental side of the industry. My writing style may also become more casual, but I’m not sure yet. We’ll see how it goes; hope you guys enjoy the ride!

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I’d like to take a moment to talk about my recent foray into game development. It’s nothing fancy, just a simple, low quality clicking game. Though it may not seem like much, I’m actually very happy with the results. It was my first attempt at making a game, and it turned out to be an awesome entry-level project.

This is the first of many things to come. I’ll be posting all of my projects on the blog, so tune in every once in a while if you’re interested.

The game is extremely typical of a starter project. It begins with Pikachu flying around the room and bouncing off of the clouds that function as walls. The player’s goal is to click on Pikachu, in which case he will reset at another location and pick up the pace. You’ll get 10 points for each click on Pikachu. The game will continue until…. well, until you get bored and close the game, I didn’t really bother to implement a time limit, but I may just throw one in later on.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

It’s not the most impressive thing in the world, but I’m quite happy with the way it turned out. If you want to give it a try, I’ve uploaded the game here at Mediafire.

My long-term aspiration is to uphold a gaming-related career. Of the numerous paths in the industry, I’m currently aiming to participate in game development. I hope that you’ll stick around and continue to read up on the blog as I pursue my dreams.

The game was made entirely using the Studio version of Game Maker via Steam. Also as a disclaimer, I do not own the rights to Pikachu so this is not a commercial product.